VSM & VEM Compatibility

[gaveerossi]

Hi budies,

I want to upgrade only a part of  the VEM modules of a vCenter environment.

My scenario has two ESXi clusters with 3 hosts each one, so I want to upgrade only one cluster to the latest version of VSM.

My ask is if VEM can have a different version that VSM? I supossed that if I upgrade the VSM, I could download the last VEM from it and apply it to only the hosts of one cluster of my environment. At this way, I would have one cluster with "old" VEM and another with the "new" VEM working together with the new VSM upgraded. Is that possible or does VSM only works with the VEM same version?

I have looked for some documentation about this but i dont find anything concrete.

Thank you very much!!

[sprasath]

Hi Adrian,

What's your current running version and to which version are you planning to upgrade to?

Thanks,

Shankar

[gaveerossi]

Hi sprasath

First of all, thanks for your interest.

I already have the 4.0(4)SV1(3a) and I am thinking about upgrade to 4.2(1)SV1(4b).

Is important to know that I am trying this because I want to be sure that the entire upgrade process works fine. And the first cluster I mentioned before is the pre-production environment, where i want to check the new version without impact in production cluster.

I hope it will clear your doubt.

Thanks a lot.

[lwatta · Accepted solution]

Adrian,

You are running some old code :-). We'd really like to see you upgrade to 2.1 if possible. You will need to first upgrade to 1.4 and then you can upgrade to 2.1

What you are proposing will work with some caveats

1. With any version lower then 2.1 the VEMs and the VSMs really need to be at the same level

2. You will not be able to make any configuration changes while some of the VEMs are not at the same level as the VSM.

If you want some practice for the upgrade remember that the N1Kv can work on nested ESXi. So fire up some virutal ESXi hosts, and a new VSM and run through the upgrade.

Also remember to backup your VSMs before the upgrade. You can clone the VSM VM and copy off the running config to be safe.

louis

[gaveerossi]

Thank you very much lwatta. I will upgrade the entire environment finally but i have to backup it before anyway.

Best regards.

Thanks!!

[achrich]

Hi,

Sorry to jump on this thread but I have a simlair question. We have enviroments where several ESX hosts where it may not be possible to upgrade all the VEM`s in a single window. Are the newer VSM`s backwards compatable with the older VEM versions ?

The versions in question are :

VSM/VEM -  4.2(1)SV2(1.1a)

ESXi - VMware ESXi 5.1.0 Releasebuild-1065491

We`re moving to 2.1 of the Sv2 release to avoid the recent security exploit.

Could someone please advise ?

Thanks

[lwatta]

If you are upgrading from 1.5x to 2.1 you should be fine.

The 2.1 VSM is tolerant with VEMs that are at an older release.

So you can upgrade the VSM and then upgrade the VEM modules when you are able to. You'll still be able to make changes on the VSM even though your VEMs are at a lower rev.

louis

[achrich]

Thanks for the reply - it sounds like we should be OK but I`m not understanding your version numbers. I`m new to the 1000v switches so is 1.5 a VEM version number and if so how do I find out what version a VEM is from VSM ?